Performing Sex: The Making and Unmaking of Women's Erotic Lives
Breanne Fahs
Language: English
Pages: 376
ISBN: 143843782X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A candid and provocative critique of women’s sexual liberation in America.
Although conventional wisdom holds that women in the United States today are more sexually liberated than ever before, a number of startling statistics call into question this perceived victory: over half of all women report having faked orgasms; 45 percent of women find rape fantasies erotic; a growing number of women perform same-sex eroticism for the viewing benefit of men; and recent clinical studies label 40 percent of women as “sexually dysfunctional.” Caught between postsexual revolution celebrations of progress and alarmingly regressive new modes of disempowerment, the forty women interviewed in Performing Sex offer a candid and provocative portrait of “liberated” sex in America. Through this nuanced and complex study, Breanne Fahs demonstrates that despite the constant cooptation of the terms of sexual freedom, women’s sexual subjectivities—and the ways they continually grapple with shifting definitions of liberation—represent provocative spaces for critical inquiry and personal discovery, ultimately generating novel ways of imagining and reimagining power, pleasure, and resistance.
“Fahs has the opportunity here to shape what should become a burgeoning subfield in gender and sexuality studies—the study of sexual subjectivities. This straddles social psychology, women’s studies, and sociology and explores the concept that social influences and forces effect how people come to understand themselves on an individual or psychological level.” — Rebecca F. Plante, coeditor of Doing Gender Diversity: Readings in Theory and Real-World Experience
resist, the impositions of patriarchy? What does it mean that there is such an enormous amount of coercion in women’s sexual fantasies? What does the distance between literal pleasure and sexual fantasy say about the gendered politics of performance? What emotional narratives and cultural scripts do women attach to their sexual fantasies? Are fantasies politically relevant, whimsically interesting, or primarily a reflection of deep-seated internalization of male fantasy narratives? The concluding
fantasies, noting that in the case of performative bisexuality, these problems were heightened. For example, Mitra, age 29, argued that it reflected men’s fantasies at the expense of women: I think [performative bisexuality] is exploitative too because it’s not really about them. It’s about pleasing some male fantasy. It’s like our culture has become so oversexed, but I still feel like it’s the male version of what sex is. I don’t feel like there’s a female voice in defining what’s sexy in our
represent a shift away from compulsory heterosexuality. In addition to reflecting a small subversion of compulsory heterosexuality, other narratives also explain why heterosexual-identified women reported same-sex behavior: Particularly for those trying out bisexuality now, they may respond to a cultural push toward mainstreaming and performing same-sex behavior with other women. Many women, particularly younger women, felt pressured to engage in sex with other women (typically in front of men),
about the person I’m with, so if there’s a problem, I need to work on the relationship and the way I am not feeling stimulated rather than jumping right to the medication. Anger and resentment at the medical field and its priorities also arose when discussing women’s reservations about Viagra for women, as the drug symbolized corporate and medical greed, the prioritization of medicines over other aspects of women’s lives, and the recklessness of the medical profession with regard to women’s
think there’s a stigma in our society that women don’t desire or want sex as much as men do, and I don’t necessarily think that’s true. This shows that they think women can’t keep up with men’s sexual desire. Fiona’s statements about the gendering of sex also show her resistance to constructing herself as a woman with deficient sexual desire in need of pharmaceuticals. Notably, Fiona said earlier in the interview that her antidepressants had made her desire sex less (something that concerned and